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Why are you so angry, to the extent of blurring the truth, about something which apparently has zero impact on you? I think listing “need to learn to program”

Why are you so angry, to the extent of blurring the truth, about something which apparently has zero impact on you? I think listing “need to learn to program” as a negative prerequisite of “want to build apps” is somewhat disingenuous.

supernintendo 7y ago
> Why are you so angry I'm not angry although I am somewhat frustrated with some of the fragmentation that exists in software, especially when so many on Hacker News are quick to dismiss projects that try to bridge that gap. I understand why Electron is hated but why isn't there a better alternative? How many attempts have there been at providing a good cross-platform UI toolkit that can build applications which look and feel "right" on the platforms they target? Gtk+, Qt, WxWidgets, etc. all suffer the same fate over time and a lot of it has to do with growing technical debt as a result of endless domain-specific iteration. New UX patterns to account for, more OS-specific APIs to learn, etc. Compare Apple's strategy to that of Microsoft. macOS Catalina has this new feature called Catalyst which lets you run apps written for iOS on macOS. Very cool although you'll have to write your app in Xcode which only runs on a Mac and that app you wrote won't run on any other platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft maintains a free IDE that works on all of the major operating systems (Visual Studio Code), they let you easily set up a Linux environment in Windows using WSL, they're focusing on languages like TypeScript etc. With how profitable Azure is for the company, it makes sense the company is not interested in locking you into a Windows-only world. In the same way, I'm not surprised that Apple development is so specific to the Apple ecosystem. > I think listing “need to learn to program” as a negative prerequisite of “want to build apps” is somewhat disingenuous. If you think "need to learn to program" and "need to learn Swift, Apple-only APIs, etc." are equivalent, then you're the disingenuous one.

supernintendo 7y ago

> Why are you so angry I'm not angry although I am somewhat frustrated with some of the fragmentation that exists in software, especially when so many on Hacker News are quick to dismiss projects that try to bridge that gap. I understand why Electron is hated but why isn't there a better alternative? How many attempts have there been at providing a good cross-platform UI toolkit that can build applications which look and feel "right" on the platforms they target? Gtk+, Qt, WxWidgets, etc. all suffer the same fate over time and a lot of it has to do with growing technical debt as a result of endless domain-specific iteration. New UX patterns to account for, more OS-specific APIs to learn, etc. Compare Apple's strategy to that of Microsoft. macOS Catalina has this new feature called Catalyst which lets you run apps written for iOS on macOS. Very cool although you'll have to write your app in Xcode which only runs on a Mac and that app you wrote won't run on any other platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft maintains a free IDE that works on all of the major operating systems (Visual Studio Code), they let you easily set up a Linux environment in Windows using WSL, they're focusing on languages like TypeScript etc. With how profitable Azure is for the company, it makes sense the company is not interested in locking you into a Windows-only world. In the same way, I'm not surprised that Apple development is so specific to the Apple ecosystem. > I think listing “need to learn to program” as a negative prerequisite of “want to build apps” is somewhat disingenuous. If you think "need to learn to program" and "need to learn Swift, Apple-only APIs, etc." are equivalent, then you're the disingenuous one.